THE PUREST AMBITION OF ALL

By Norman Hildes-Heim; Norman Hildes-Heim is the rowing correspondent for The New York Times.

Published: August 11, 1985

THE AMATEURS By David Halberstam. 221 pp. New York: William Morrow & Company. $14.95.

IN ''The Amateurs,'' David Halberstam focuses on the quest of four oarsmen to become the United States's single sculler in the 1984 Olympics. He has drawn interviews with a number of figures in American rowing into a narrative that becomes a paean to the four oarsmen who devoted themselves to becoming Olympians ''because they wanted to, for no reward other than the feeling itself.''

''Those who competed,'' he writes, ''did so with a demonic passion. Yet there was no overt financial reward at the end, nor indeed was there even any covert financial reward, a brokerage house wanting and giving special privilege to the famed amateur. Yet the athletes were almost always the children of the upper middle class, privileged, affluent. . . . One could understand the son of a ghetto family . . . hoping that basketball was a ticket out of the slum: it was harder to understand the son of Beacon Hill spending so much time and subjecting himself to so much pain to attain an honor that no one else even understood.''

The amateur Mr. Halberstam most thoroughly develops is Tiff Wood, Harvard 1975, the holder of the world bronze medal and reigning American champion, the oldest of the four contenders and the one who has sacrificed the most in training time and deferred career. The other oarsmen, who become the foils for Mr. Wood, are John Biglow, Yale '80 and the ultimate winner of the 1984 Olympic sculling berth; Joe Bouscaren, Mr. Biglow's close friend, who graduated from Yale a year ahead of him; and Brad Lewis, a loner from the University of California at Irvine, who always had trouble with coaches and who loved to do what people told him he could not do.

Mr. Halberstam delves into the backgrounds of these four men, explores their psyches and tries to explain what drives them. In doing so, he sometimes gets caught up with himself. One wonders whether Mr. Halberstam has misread the situation when, in relating the final 500 meters of the singles trial race held in Princeton, N.J., he describes Mr. Biglow as surprised to find himself trailing not Mr. Wood but Mr. Lewis. Mr. Halberstam believes Mr. Biglow is driven to overtake Mr. Lewis - as he does - because he so dislikes the image he thinks Mr. Lewis would present to the public should he become America's representative at the Olympics. But it is hard to believe Mr. Biglow, enduring the most painful race of his career, could be distracted, much less motivated, by such petty feelings.

After Mr. Biglow has won the singles trials, he confronts Harry Parker, who coached Mr. Wood at Harvard and who, in 1984, was also serving as the Olympic sculling coach. '' 'I have a feeling that you would have preferred that Tiff had won,' '' Mr. Biglow says. Mr. Parker ''realized immediately that he had to match Biglow's candor with his own. 'I think you're right, John.' '' If Mr. Parker wanted Mr. Wood to win, Mr. Halberstam seems to have taken this as his cue and made Mr. Wood the centerpiece of the book. Despite the effort Mr. Halberstam expends explaining the other oarsmen, his story reads as though ghostwritten, with Mr. Wood the ghost behind the writer.

Mr. Wood's compulsion to scull began in his undergraduate years, when he unsuccessfully sought to become the stroke (the rower who sets the pace) of his Harvard crew. ''One reason he ended up in a single shell was that it was the only way he could get to stroke a boat,'' Mr. Halberstam writes. It was also a way to gain recognition in a sport in which anonymity is the lot of the sweep (or team) oarsmen, who are the purest of amateurs. Unfortunately, Mr. Halberstam does not expand on this theme.

After Mr. Wood's defeat in the scull trials, his story takes on heroic proportions. His loss in the singles trials is portrayed as contributing to his failure to secure a position on either the double or quadruple boats. Along the way, his relationship with Mr. Parker, his mentor and idol, deteriorates. Mr. Wood never complains and, as a consolation, is chosen as the alternate oarsman for the Olympics. Mr. Halberstam closes his story with Mr. Wood at the Olympic rowing finals, too pained to watch Mr. Biglow racing. Almost lost in the tale is a paragraph about Mr. Wood's congratulating Mr. Biglow after he had won the singles trial two months earlier. I remember that moment because I was standing next to Mr. Biglow when Mr. Wood spoke to him. Early in the book, Mr. Halberstam quotes Mr. Wood as saying, ''rowing is about winning.'' But now, having lost, Mr. Wood graciously saluted Mr. Biglow. In their own private world, the oarsmen had confronted each other and themselves and resolved their contest. ''The Amateurs'' is their deftly told story. SCULLERS SPILL THEIR STORY David Halberstam was upset when he watched the 1984 Winter Olympics on television. At what? ''The hype,'' he said. Mr. Halberstam, who four years ago explored avarice in professional basketball in ''The Breaks of the Game,'' said in a recent telephone interview that he had been appalled at the commercial exploitation of the Olympics and its competitors. Thus the idea behind ''The Amateurs'' was born. Before the Summer Olympics began in June he would seek out athletes, if he could find any, who went about their sport without an expectation of fame or material reward. He seized upon sculling, supposing that if there were any true amateurs left, they might be found alone in a small boat with two oars their only company. He was familiar with the sport because as an undergraduate he had participated in intramural rowing at Harvard University. The reporting went easily. He found Tiff Wood, the sculler who became the focus of the book, through the Boston phone book, and Mr. Wood was delighted to talk. Even a reticent coach, Harry Parker, told all. Mr. Halberstam sees the rowers as ''obsessed,'' highly articulate athletes. ''All their lives,'' he said, ''they've been waiting to be asked, and here I come.'' In the course of writing a magazine article, he discovered so much intrigue at the Olympic trials in Princeton, N.J., in April that he said to himself, ''By God, this has to be a book!'' The rowers he met while writing ''The Amateurs'' have left their mark on him. Mr. Halberstam has resumed rowing, sculling in Nantucket harbor, near his home. ''I love it,'' he said. - William N. Wallace